Health care settings such as hospitals can involve relatively complex information and work flows. Health care workers can serve in a wide variety of roles and work in many different physical locations across a hospital or other enterprise. Some workers, such as physicians, can be very mobile. As would be expected in such an environment, effective communication among workers can be essential for the overall operation of a hospital or other enterprise to be coherent and productive.
Different users can have different information needs, and often times those needs may require relatively specialized, custom views of information about patient care, patient flow, or resource utilization. These unique needs may be satisfied through a query of an information database or other data storage device which can contain information about the patient care process. The query can provide a set of results as items, such as a set of patients, rooms, or beds. Many conventional systems may support such specialized queries of databases and other data storage devices, and may display the query results in a tabular form. In some instances, a particular query may be repeated by a user to periodically update the display to show any changes in the query results.
These types of queries and user interfaces can have drawbacks. For example, query results from these conventional systems can be time consuming to read and use. In some instances, relatively important information or other particularly relevant information in a query result may not be readily apparent or may appear later in the query results.
Therefore, a need exists for methods, systems, and apparatus for providing real time query support and graphical views of patient care information.
A further need exists for methods, systems, and apparatus for providing a graphical user interface for real time query support for patient care.
Yet a further need exists for providing methods, systems, and apparatus for providing real time information for patient care in a health care environment.